IT'S time for a change in the laws to allow booze to be sold at football grounds again if we want to reverse the slide in attendances.

The revelations from Celtic that alcohol could be back on the menu inside football grounds is not just welcome. It’s years overdue. Thirty years to be exact.

The demonisation of normal football fans has gone on for long enough and, make no mistake, this issue has been the biggest stick which has beaten them for three decades.

For years, we have been told football is an entertainment business.

It must compete fiercely with the rest of the social attractions and sporting events to earn the customer’s coins. Yet for a very long time, football has been fighting with one arm tied behind its back.

Take the kids bowling for the day? Dad can have a pint. Cinema? Theatre? Pop concert? No problem. Have a couple of drinks, relax and enjoy your day.

Just about every single sport you can name allows you to have a drink. You can’t get more stiff-necked than cricket, tennis or golf, yet you can have a pint at the Ashes at Lords, a Pimms at Wimbers or a dram at The Open.

From gigs like the rugby, the darts and the racing, to the minority sports of ice hockey, basketball or speedway.

While Kilmarnock versus Hearts could only drag 3500 through the gates at Rugby Park last Saturday, just a few short miles down the road in Ayr there was a record attendance at horse racing’s Scottish Grand National.

The racetrack crammed a sensational 18,500 into the place for a day of fun and frolics. But ask yourself this.

If Ayr racecourse was not allowed to sell you a pint or a wee vodka for the ladies how many folk would have gone and how many would have stayed in the pub and watched the race on Channel 4?

Plenty – and we’ve all seen it.

Lads arrange to meet up in a bar at 12 noon on a Saturday to have a few pints, watch the early game on the screens before jumping on a train or into a taxi at 2.40pm to get to the game.

How many times have those aforementioned boys got to 2.30pm and the pub is buzzing. It’s warm, Jeff Stelling is coming on and there is a 6-4 favourite you fancy in the 3.05 at Ascot.

They look at the £20 ticket money in their pocket and think, ‘I could just stay here, stick a fiver on a coupon, a fiver on that horse and put the other tenner into the kitty to pay my beer for the rest of the day’.

Be assured, on dark winter days, that happens an awful lot more often than you think. If the lads were already in the stadium that choice would be gone.

A beer with the boys is part of the day and the blunt truth is that’s football’s pound which is being handed out to breweries instead of the clubs.

That is just plain wrong. In England, it happens every week. Instead of the pub down the road they congregate in their own stadium and do the same thing.

Only, instead of frantically dashing up to the ground in a cab, causing a log-jam at turnstiles at kick-off, they simply walk up the stairs from their concourse and into their seat.

Of course there are those who will try to abuse it. You know the ones. The guys with the invisible tattoo on their foreheads which reads: Instant idiot, just add alcohol. But if they are going to be nuggets at the game they’ll do it anyway.

They’ll just try and leather a bottle of wine and four cans as quick as they can before the game and be an irritating muppet in any case.

At least if it’s controlled in the stadium with stewards and police around, you can keep an eye on them. No one is saying football grounds should become big beer festivals. Jeez, the way men have turned effeminate these days, you’d probably sell them as many glasses of red and white wine.

If you have a Family Stand, don’t have an alcohol stall. Sell soft drinks, have the club mascot getting pictures taken, do face-painting for the kids. But just get people into the ground spending their hard earned.

The hypocrisy and treatment of the normal fan in the alcohol issue is disgusting. Let’s get it right, if you wear a shirt and tie and pay for a hospitality ticket you can stand and drink as many pints as you want before and after the game.

But if you are wearing jeans and a jumper in the adjacent section of the stadium, you are an eejit who cannot be trusted to have a social drink without vomiting on to the guy in front of you, peeing on your seat before breaking it with a kick and chipping your plastic pint glass at a linesman. It’s scandalous and it should be stopped.

Not just for the treatment of fans but for the clubs themselves.

If 15,000 people go to Tynecastle and 5000 buy two pints at £3 each, that’s £30,000 turnover for the club. With 20 games in a season, that’s £600,000 per annum going into Tynecastle instead of pubs on Gorgie Road. The profit could help fund the youth set-up.

Football is crying out for income and here is a situation where they are being robbed of what is rightfully theirs.

It is their fans filling up pubs before games and pouring money behind the bar, when they could be pouring it directly into their first-team transfer budget.

Football has changed. We all know that. Now it’s time for the laws to change too.

It’s time to trust and treat football fans like the consumers and customers they are, instead of pig-mannered half-wits who can’t have two pints without turning into a crackpot.